Targeted Relief: Geography of Emergency Rental Assistance Funds

README for Data and Code Files

by Theodore F. Figinski, Sydney Keenan, Richard Sweeney, and Erin Troland

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Note: Our manuscript uses data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Participant
Household Payment Data File (PHPDF). These data are not publicly available. All results 
were reviewed, by staff of the Office of Economic Policy, prior to their distribution to 
ensure that no confidential information was disclosed. Researchers interested accessing the 
PHPDF can apply for access through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 
(HUD’s) Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). PD&R has the authority to enter into
Data License Agreements with research organizations for the explicit purpose of conducting
innovative research projects that inform HUD’s policies and programs, including
affordable rental housing. For more information on PD&R Data License Agreements,
please visit https://www.huduser.gov/portal/research/pdr_data-license.html.

While tract-level data are not available, users may also be interested in the county-month 
level and the county-total level data made publicly available by members of the Housing 
Initiative at Penn, the Eviction Lab (Princeton University), and Urban Displacement Project 
(University of California, Berkeley). The relevant citation is:
	Kim, Chi-Hyun, Grace Hartley, Jacob Haas, Tim Thomas, Rebecca Yae, and Peter Hepburn. 
		County Emergency Rental Assistance Spending. 2025. 
		Accessed via https://housinginitiative.github.io/era-county-level-dataset-public/.

Code used for initial PHPDF files cannot be posted. This README assumes that authors have 
access to geocoded PHPDF files, including files that were re-geocoded to 2010 tracts.

Data from the American Community Survey are from IPUMS. 

The code included has been anonymized to ensure the confidentiality of the data. 
Code files with the relevant crosswalks between the anonymized and non-anonymized
code can be shared with researchers who provide proof of access to the PHPDF 
via HUD PD&R. 

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#Base Data Files#
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ERA data is from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Data was last updated February 2024.
Eviction data is from the Eviction Lab. An updated data file was provided in December 2024.
	Data can be accessed from https://evictionlab.org/ and
	https://eviction-lab-data-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/data-for-analysis/tract_proprietary_valid_2000_2018_y2024m12.csv
Demographic data is from the American Community Survey 2016-2020 5-year estimates. It was 
	last accessed in October 2023 from IPUMS NHGIS https://www.nhgis.org/
The conversion file between 2020 and 2010 census tracts were last accessed October 2023 from Census
	https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/relationship-files.2020.html#tract
The population data was accessed in August 2022 from https://mcdc.missouri.edu/applications/geocorr2022.html

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#Code of Cleaning and Preparing Data#
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era_create_df_clean.R -- Takes in the previously geocoded ERA data. Cleans the data and merges
	ACS demographic data.

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#Code to Collapse Data#
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era_analysis_clean.R -- Collapses cleaned data by various demographic variables into deciles and
	calculates average funds per renting household along with other summary statistics. File
	merges in eviction data and converts 2020 tracts into 2010 tracts, the type of tract used
	in the eviction file. File additionally calcuates the eviction risk factor.

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#Code to Create Figures#
########################
era_bingraphs.do -- Creates the decile dot plots and calculates the payment difference between
	the highest and lowest deciles.